Sunrise Guitars Opens on College Avenue

Staff Photo Nick Brothers
Sunrise Guitars, now located 2781 N College Ave, is now open. The store sells a variety of stringed instruments, electronics and offers lessons. Adjacent to the store is Sunrise Stage, where intimate concerts will be held.

Musicians, aspiring musicians and music fans have a new premier spot in Fayetteville to buy and repair instruments, take lessons and watch performances.

Sunrise Guitars, now open where the Subaru car dealership once was at 2781 N College Ave., used to be formerly known as Ben Jacks Guitars before Don Nelms bought the company and re-branded it as Sunrise Guitars at the former location on Drake Avenue.

The new building sports an exterior natural wood trim and a mural of a sunrise guitar out front that’s easy to spot while driving Highway 71. The remodel was by Miller Boskus Lack Architects. The new facilities now has 8,500 square feet of retail space including a temperature and humidity controlled storage room for sensitive instruments, six private lesson rooms, a repair area and a media room.

The store carries several styles of guitars, mandolins, ukeleles, basses and banjos from Martin, Taylor, Yamaha, Cordoba, Gibson, G&L and Eastman, among other brands. One of Fayetteville’s local luthiers, Bayard Blain, sells his locally made guitars there. There are two isolated rooms for trying out amplifiers and guitars, and in the back is a variety of electric pianos and sound equipment.

Staff Photo
The acoustic room is crown jewel of Sunrise Guitars. A wide selection of high-end to affordable acoustics line the walls. The room is climate controlled, and offers a variety of guitar-friendly seating

“Few stores have retail space like this,” said Tim Nelson, general manager. “The acoustic room is beautiful, and it’s something very unique we don’t have around here. We want to give the community something to be proud of.”

Nelms said he wants Sunrise Guitars to be a regional destination music store for customers seeking special and custom high quality instruments not available elsewhere in the area as well as guitars $200 and up.

“I hope people believe it’s worth the wait and unique to Fayetteville,” Nelms said. “We want to try and better serve people, whether they’re collectors or musicians, and provide them with professional quality instruments. We want to be a premier music store.”

On the north side of the building, there’s the “Sunrise Stage,” which is a 3,000 square foot performance venue that will seat up to 130 guests along with a spacious reception area and restrooms. The stage will operate as its own entity.

Staff Photo Nick Brothers
The electric guitar selection offers guitars from Taylor, Yamaha, Gibson, G&L and Eastman, as well as several amplifiers from Orange and Vox, among others.

The stage will be host to a variety of intimate performances from touring artists and groups, student recitals, group classes, clinics and workshops and potentially more. Many of the details with the stage are still in planning, said Ben Harris, the store’s lesson coordinator and promoter for Sunrise Stage.

“I think it’s awesome for this area to have a pro concert hall like this,” he said. “Fayetteville needs a listening room, and I’m excited to see how it’s going to be put to use for the community.”

The stage is predicted to up and running with concerts by January 2017, Harris said.

For several decades, the building where Sunrise operates now has been a car dealership for a variety of manufacturers, the last of which was a Subaru dealership, owned by Nelms. After Nelms closed the Subaru location and moved it out near Porter Road, he kept it purposefully vacant until he found something that sat well with his heart.

Staff Photo Nick Brothers
The performance space inside the Sunrise Stage will be able to have as many as 130 attendees with seats. A variety of concerts and performances will likely begin sometime near January 2017.

A few years back, while listening to a certain favorite song on the radio, inspiration struck Nelms to learn how to play guitar. So he drove to Ben Jacks and picked out a guitar to learn. After talking with the staff, he soon found out the store was about to go under and close up shop.

“I thought to myself, ‘No way, I’m not going to let that happen,’” Nelms said. “It was right then when I started dreaming up what would be Sunrise Guitars.”

The inspiration for “Sunrise Guitars” comes from a photograph Nelms took from his back deck that looks out over the Ozark mountains in Jasper, Ark. He liked the idea of a sunrise being a metaphor for a new beginning. The color pallet of the store is based on colors found in the sunsets of his landscape photographs, some of which are on display in the store.